A glass of water

When I was about twelve years old somebody told me that if you remember to drink a full glass of water every morning, for about thirty six thousand mornings in a row, you could live to be a hundred. Of course it’s an obvious joke, but even at twelve I understood that it was also a profound joke, maybe the profound joke.

After all, I knew I could count up to thirty thousand, and it wouldn’t take me all that long either. And if I counted every number as a day of my life, by the time I got to thirty thousand I would most likely have run out my own life in numbers. Even at twelve I knew that.

There’s no getting around it – we only have on the order of thirty thousand days or so to live our entire lives. Not a million or a billion, or some comfortably huge number that doesn’t bear thinking about. No, just around thirty times a hundred – not all that many glasses of water at all.

There are two ways to look at this potentially alarming fact. One way is to bemoan the tragedy of it all – to curse the clock upon the wall for its incessant tick-tick-ticking, or to run around the house throwing out all the calendars, with their far too brief inventory of days.

The other way is to think of each day as a rather generous portion of life, a large enough chunk of the total that it would be a shame to waste it. From the moment you rise in the morning until the moment you drift off to sleep that same evening, you are actually engaged in a rather profound act, whether or not you choose to notice. You are living out about one thirty thousandth of your entire life, a fairly significant slice of the pie – the only occasion when you will ever have that particular slice to work with.

On my better days I remember this. On those days I think of that glass of water I was told about at the age of twelve, and I make sure to drink it all down. I figure I might as well savor that water to the fullest, all cool and refreshing and new. On those days I drink in life to the fullest – every last sip.